After four years of works and excavations, the twin buildings of Feltrinelli, signed by Herzog and de Meuron, are ready. They have just to finishe them with furnishings and details, Feltrinelli is already talking about a grand opening in mid-December.

The land in Porta Nuova belongs to the Feltrinelli family since ‘800 and it was unused since the days of bombing in 1943. This architectural intervention gives a new face to this part of the city, enriching it with a new green and pedestrian area. The buildings, five floors high, are made entirely of glass, a kind of encounter between Lombard Gothic and Modernism. Feltrinelli spaces will host on the ground floor a large bookstore and café, four floors of offices and a panoramic reading room on the top floor. The huge archive of the Foundation, 200 thousand volumes, 17.500 periodical collections and a million and a half of handwritten cards, will be stored in two underground floors.

While a building will host the Feltrinelli spaces, the other will be Microsoft’s new Italian headquarters. On February 2017 they are going to move from the countryside – Microsoft and its beautiful Innovation Campus are now in San Bovio, a small suburb of Peschiera Borromeo – to the city center. The ground floor will be open to the public, probably it will host a flagship store of the company’s products, events and meetings spaces. It’s kind of a secret yet, but the interiors of the 7.500 square meters have been entrusted to DEGW, architectural brand of Lombardini22 group specialized in corporate spaces. With 160 people employed, Lombardini22 is in 4th place in the ranking of Italian architectural firm by revenue. Here are some renderings of the project for the headquarters of Microsoft.